Crate & Barrel Case Study
The Platform Behind Crate & Barrel’s New eCommerce Strategy
How RevCascade is helping one of the most popular names in retail lead the marketplace revolution
The Story
Crate & Barrel, one of the most respected names in retail, has long been positioned as an industry leader. In 2016, Crate & Barrel COO Michael Relich recognized that, while the company’s ecommerce site was generating consistently high traffic, it was not driving as much revenue as it could be. Specifically, the Crate & Barrel team determined that the website’s basic wholesale/ship-from-store model could be enhanced by launching a dropship program to significantly grow their revenue.
The Challenge
Crate & Barrel saw the rise of dropshipping in the furniture and home goods industry and wanted to offer an extended aisle of products to generate more revenue with no upfront inventory cost. However, as one of the world’s biggest retailers, with potentially thousands of vendors and millions of SKUs to choose from, dropshipping can be a data and logistical nightmare without the right technology. Crate & Barrel needed a way to fully curate and sync vendors’ product lists to their site; maintain real-time inventory and product data for those SKUs; and integrate with their select vendors to manage transactions.
Solution
Enter RevCascade: Crate & Barrel integrated RevCascade’s product, inventory, and transaction APIs in just three weeks. RevCascade’s flexible, platform-agnostic integration capabilities enabled Crate & Barrel’s vendors to easily onboard via API, EDI, or directly through RevCascade’s portal. Crate & Barrel’s buyers, utilizing RevCascade’s merchandising tools, maintain full control of the dropship products. Crate & Barrel also utilizes RevCascade’s co-branded vendor onboarding tools and custom reporting. With RevCascade’s end to end solution for dropshipping, Crate & Barrel was able to quickly launch and begin scaling its dropship program.
Results
RevCascade’s powerful platform enabled Crate & Barrel to launch their dropship program in less than 60 days, and the solution is now being rolled out on Crate & Barrel’s sister companies CB2 and Land of Nod. Crate & Barrel now operates a thriving dropship program that generates significantly more revenue from an extended aisle of products with zero upfront inventory cost, resulting in a “win-win-win” for Crate & Barrel, its vendors, and its consumers.